Released a few years ago but it seems few people picked up on it. It's a really kaleidoscopic record because it has so many ingredients. The sound is based in both electronic and modern classical, but it is all seen together by a very jazzy structure. Highly recommended.

have been listening to more and more jazz over the past few years...started out with easier blue note hard bop and am now enjoying the much more chaotic free jazz stuff. this album is an awesome skronkfest with the original quartet plus added Pharoah Sanders...the energy is relentless.

Mario Lalli and Larry Lalli are LEGERNDS amongst the desert rock scene that threw up Kyuss, QOTSA, earthlings? (who are also really underrated), Brant Bjork, and whoever else, as members of the OG stoner band Yawning Man. anyway, it's kinda punky (they first released stuff on SST), kinda deserty, kinda I dunno, just really good.

One of the best bands of the 90's in my opinions. It was so great to see them at ATP a few years ago. Rock deconstructionists in the same vein as Royal Trux, US Maple, Dead C etc. They fused garage, psych, pop, noise. I could have gone for any of their albums really but went for the Mother of All Saints which is my favourite.

Its a mega fun synth led funk kinda genre. Its kinda like 8-bit but its usualy made with analogue synths rather than computers. Its made on minimal setups, and thats where the name comes from, the artists squeeze out all they can from the synths to make the tracks. Since its more synth based they do more live shows too. Just like 8-bit is confined by just using those bits. Its way more fun and satisfactory than 8-bit to my ears. Its pure funk bliss. It mainly originates from Scaninavia.

it's been a while since I wrote about them. Post-Hardcore band from Olympia, Washington connected to the K Records scene who were just as consistently great as Fugazi in the West coast version of the same scene and yet get hardly any of their plaudits. New Plastic Ideas maybe isn't their best album but it's certainly the most solid, all 9 tracks on it are fairly incredible for their time and it's the one I've been listening to the most recently.

It regularly baffles me how this band weren't slobbered all over during their existence. Good reviews on Pitchfork, shoegazey guitars, honking Ian Curtis vocals, song titles called 'Post Plethoric Rhetoric'. COME ON.

A truly lovely album combining various dosages of found noise, ambient, cyclical guitar sounds, and nods to post-rock. Accessible. Great for while out walking or while trying to make sense of this hyperactive world.

They also have an 6 track EP/mini album (In All The Empty Houses) which is also a slice of perfection, through a more pop angle to their sound. A record that I challenge anyone not to listen to and fall in love with.

It's their most experimental album, in a world full of your Fourtets and your Ricardo Villalobos's, it was a bold move to throw down the shackles of the chic cold, minimal, glitchiness and resurect the distorted guitar and indie rock song structure which had gone unexplored for so long.

I think I've brought this up before. It's likely my favorite pop record ever. There really isn't a single note played on that record that doesn't make me incredibly happy, and doesn't feel PERFECT. A friend of mine (who introduced me to The Cure and Cibo Matto) introduced me to the record, and though I don't know what happened to him, I still have Pornography, Stereo*Type A, and this fucking album.

I've seen a couple of mentions of it but in 6 years, for an album this good, that's just not enough.
The last time someone put a gun to my head this made my top 15 records of all time...

It is: a project of Yoni Wolf (Why?) and Andy Broder (Fog). It sounds like it too, incorporating some of Yoni's lyrical fascinations from Why? and incorporating the production eccentricities from some of Broder's solo work.

It is: A tale about a van flooding on a road, a nuclear explosion survival guide, an anthropological study of the hand, a young educational guide to the human cardiac system. a study in self-abuse (the good kind)

It is: adventurous, curious, unique, idiosyncratic, fun.

It does: contains this lyric...

"Aren't babies born with creases in their palms?
Way before you'd think their hands most frequent movements've been established,
Have humans evolved to be born to hold hammers and swords?
In the years to come will see the emergence of a strong computer key finger,
In the years to come will we see a flattened mouse-pad palm?"

It sounds interesting but silly on paper. On record it's a heartbreaking epiphany about our place in the world.

It was one of Word magazine's ten albums of the year in the year it came out (pretty leftfield for them). Beautiful pastoral feel to it. Extremely difficult to pick up new though. May listen to it now.

Has a suite of songs that replicate an LSD experience on one side (not as cheesy as that may sound), a white soul medley on the other and this gorgeous, glorious tune in the middle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kYgsELoMNE

but I absolutely adore this album. Felt like a lot of sketched out half-ideas of two artists at the peak of their creativity. Nothing on there other than the first track is particularly striking in isolation, but this album still puts them at #33 of all time on my most-played last.fm list.

2 years in the making, as good as all the classic weird pop albums (with an extra helping of good old cinematic/evil vibes) and limited to 300 physical copies because the poor sod's record label shelved it for being too weird, forcing him to release it himself. I never see Slim Twig's name mentioned around these parts, except maybe for his affiliation with U.S. Girls. Top shelf shit and no mistake. You'll take it and like it!: http://slimtwig.bandcamp.com/track/heavy-splendour

My favorite record of 2011 by a mile, but hardly saw anyone talk about it.

Really difficult to describe it without sounding like a dick, but it's like listening to a late night radio station playing Mulatu Astatke and 70s dub records all at the same time. Genuinely unlike anything I've heard before.

There's an excerpt on Youtube, but it doesn't really do it justice - you need to hear the whole thing ideally

Punk (Post-punk? The beginnings of 'alternative'? I don't know) BRILLIANCE! Eleven tracks of sheer excellence with some of the best-sounding guitar you'll ever hear. You'll also want to shout along to all the choruses.

I chose this because he's got a new album out in a couple of weeks that I'll undoubtedly be plugging in the recommended albums thread if its anywhere near as good as this beautiful, otherworldly record. It's based around his mesmerising acoustic guitar playing but features splashes of brass and piano and enriched with occasional drones and found sound. If you like Six Organs of Admittance, James Blackshaw or the greats like Fahey and Basho then I pretty much guarantee you'll love it. This is the only studio recording I could find on youtube but there's quite a bit of live stuff that's well worth a watch

Fucking insanity from some Finns circa 1994, reminiscent of Mr Bungle, Cardiacs and the Dead Kennedys being fed through a four-track recorder backwards, or something. Eighteen songs, in six suites of three. I said this about it a while back:

"like a more seamless, less self-conscious mr bungle, but with possibly more range and better songwriting? and a slier humour? and more punk? camp blackfoot were mentioned upthread - their music is pretty much in this album's unhinged shadow (as is the mars volta's, kinda)

each trilogy (interesting deconstruction of 'prog' as essentially consisting, short-story-style, of a beginning, middle and end) so far has been better than the one before it, and the first one was fucking amazing"

If you can get through Valz/Hot Mambo/Antivalz without suffering some kind of temporary delirium then you're a stronger soul than I. Imagine a very drunk Mars Volta playing a kids' party...

Craw was an independent band from Cleveland, OH that was together for over 13 years, from approximately 1989 to 2002. Their first three records (s/t, Lost Nation Road and Map, Monitor, Surge) were engineered by Steve Albini, the 4th record (Bodies for Strontium 90) was engineered by Bill Korecky.

Listening to Craw is quite an experience. It’s like when you are walking down the street and some stranger punches you in the face. You expect to be angry, but you feel this tinge of ectasy melt over your body. You don’t understand it, but you want it again so you beg to be punched again. He is a little confused, but he does it. Between the crack of your broken nose and the warm blood running down your face, you are in heaven. You feel the incomparable pleasure course through your veins. You can no longer stand. Somehow, through the heavy panting you gasp out a gargled “AGAIN” but he’s starting to get freaked out so he leaves. There’s no time to beg, you can never live without this feeling again so you begin to hurriedly limp down the street. You come to a big pane glass window, and you smash your head through. That’s enough, it drives you over the point and you experience the greatest moment of your life. Just afterwards, as you lie in the street with glass showering over your face, you realize that you don’t want to live anymore. You will never have a better moment than that. Your first thought it of the horrors of the world you have to return to, like a baby coming out of the womb.

Beautiful, lo-fi, melancholy bedroom pop with a mix of uncertain vocals, chopped up guitars and midi electronics. Reminds me sometimes of Jon Brion's soundtrack work on stuff like eternal sunshine. This is the only track I can find on youtube but it's on Spotify I think.

Baggy post-punk folk crossover from late-80s Manchester. Possibly THE most Mancunian album in the world ever. Great lyrics and song titles that portray a world of low-life chancers & scumbags, kind of like Happy Mondays meets Stan Barstow.

Like Lush on steroids or a more self conscious Daisy Chainsaw, I heard a couple of acoustic tracks on the radio and was hooked when I heard the album. A very muscly sort of shoegaze sound with crystal clear production, the girl singing does the whispery and the shouty thing without going into Courtney Love histronics and the songs are just so poppy they've stuck in my head for years. I think they were kiwis based in London, then they moved home and renamed themselves The Bads but I never heard anything as good as this.

If I broke the rules I would talk about Now, Now's "Threads", which is sort of Interpol/Arcade Firey and great, and Econoline's "Music Is Stupid" and ponder whether they were the UK's belated answer to the Minutemen.

progressive metal made by hill people; vhs samples, acid and cheap speed. like it when bands couldn't be from anywhere that they're not from and i've never had a more vivid picture in my mind than the knotted roots and swampland here; rotting fish and skinned mustelids outside every hut. fucking vile aposematic vocals, genuinely melodic, earthy songwriting. baffled it/they're not held up as absolute top dogs in modern metal tbh. woodson lateral <3